Exile

by Aaron Allston

  Luke drew away from his sister and followed Mara’s lead in shaking hands or offering embraces all around: Han, Lando, Wedge, Corran, Mirax. “It’s good to see you,” he said. The words were simple, but they came from his heart. It startled him to feel this level of relief at seeing people in person when he already knew they were alive and well—but, he supposed, the heart did not always believe what the mind knew to be true.

  “Us, too,” Han said, and it was apparent that the distance that had developed between the two men, back when it became clear that Han supported Corellian independence while Luke remained loyal to the Alliance, had finally closed. “Though we’re kind of surprised to see you here.”

  “We were in the neighborhood,” Mara said. “Not a joke. We’re in the Corellian system to see if we can pin Jacen down, get a few answers from him. Ben is missing.” Leia did not miss the little flash of pain visible in Mara’s face, detectable through the Force. “We don’t think Jacen knows where he is, but he has some information that might lead us to Ben.”

  “You’ve chosen a good time to visit, then,” Wedge said. “Jacen is here. Aboard Errant Venture.”

  Luke gave him a dubious look. “Jacen, gambling?”

  “No.” Corran shook his head, clearly annoyed. “He’s wandering around, looking things over. Maybe he’s come to the same conclusion we did—that Errant Venture is a very useful tool for gathering data. Seems a very GAG thing for him to think of. Or maybe he wants to make sure that the ship doesn’t constitute a security leak that would help the Corellians. Either way, he’s here, so those of us he knows are having to keep even more out of sight.”

  “No more gambling, even in disguise, until he goes away,” Han added.

  “There’s something else,” Leia said. “Something I’ve been sensing through the Force for the last few days. There’s a presence aboard ship, someone or something I can’t identify … but it’s here. Watchful.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Luke said. “You won’t be offended if Mara and I go to pin Jacen with some questions in a few minutes.”

  Leia shook her head. “Just be careful.”

  “Count on it.” Luke seemed to hesitate before continuing. “In the meantime there are some things we need to bring you up to date on.”

  “Such as Alema Rar and Lumiya, Dark Lady of the Sith,” Mara said. “And we now have a little Force technique, developed by Master Cilghal, that will help us counter the way Alema meddles with memory. We’ll teach you.”

  Jacen stopped a few meters from one of the tables in the Maw Casino. Like so many of the individual dens on this ship, this one was named for a particular planet or region of space and decorated accordingly. As the Maw was an area where clustered black holes surrounded a hidden region, swallowing all light, the Maw Casino was dark, its walls black. Its silvery tables were edged with dim glow rods, and there was no overhead lighting; the servers and other casino personnel wore piping, jewelry, and accoutrements that glowed. The décor made the casino an intimate one, a place where conversations could be nearly private, where trysts could be arranged or conducted with little fear of discovery.

  The table Jacen stopped to watch was a microdroid-wrestling betting table. Inset into the glowing tabletop were numerous displays. Several showed combat taking place in another chamber aboard ship—combat between droids no longer than ten centimeters, droids designed and programmed by hobbyists whose chief occupation was pitting their designs against one another. Other displays showed the odds of bets being laid on the combatants. In the duel currently taking place, a droid shaped like a piranha-beetle on treads exchanged fire with one shaped like a Tatooine sandcrawler; they were separated by a few meters of artificial terrain resembling the towering forests of Kashyyyk.

  But it wasn’t the droid fight that drew Jacen’s attention. It was the woman facing him from the center of the long edge of the table. He knew her face, and he’d never expected to see it again.

  He circled the table so that it would not be between them and stepped up next to her.

  Captain Uran Lavint looked up from her betting and her drink to nod at him. “Colonel Solo.”

  “Captain Lavint. How did you get here?”

  “That’s a silly question, isn’t it? I got here on the cargo vehicle you gave me.” She lifted her drink, tilted the container toward him in salute, and took a sip. “Please forgive me for not thanking you before now. The Duracrud has become a good-luck charm for me. My fortunes have been improving ever since I took command of her. I’ve run three cargo routes, all at a tremendous profit.”

  “You haven’t had any difficulty with her?”

  “Well, she’s old. I spent part of your payment to me giving her an overhaul. But nothing catastrophic.”

  Jacen stared down at her, baffled. Jedi could often tell when someone was lying, and Lavint was clearly withholding information, but she didn’t manifest any of the emotion that should accompany the lies he expected. If her hyperdrive had failed, she should be angry with him. She was not. If she were covering up the fact that he had ruined her financial fortunes with his actions, she should radiate resentment. She did not. Something had gone wrong with his final instructions concerning her. But he’d sort that out with his next few questions.

  Then he felt a slight flicker within the Force. He looked up to see Luke and Mara standing just inside the casino entrance, staring at him.

  He gave the captain a purely artificial smile. “We’ll get caught up later.”

  “Looking forward to it. You can buy me a drink.”

  Pushing Lavint from his mind, he approached Luke and Mara, offering each a civil handshake. “Masters Skywalker. You should have told me you were coming to Corellia.”

  “Where would you have been if we had?” Mara asked.

  Jacen blinked at the question. “Aboard the Anakin Solo, probably.” He did not add, And able to limit the time I would have to spend with you.

  Luke gave him a cheerful smile. “Well, it’s nice that we could find you when you have more time for socializing. Let’s get a table, order drinks.” Not waiting for a reply, he turned and led the way into the ranks of small tables closer to the bar. He chose an empty one that appeared to have been recently cleaned—its glowing, glossy surface was still damp—and sat.

  Mara and Jacen joined him. Jacen had to struggle just a bit to keep annoyance from his face. This encounter was inconvenient. The server, a Bothan female with silver-gray fur, not much of it covered by her abbreviated black dress, materialized to take their drinks.

  Once she was gone, Luke leaned in close. “Jacen, this is important. We need to know exactly what happened on the asteroid near Bimmiel.”

  Jacen kept his emotions under tight control and attempted to project nothing more than additional annoyance. But inwardly he felt relief, a return of confidence. Luka and Mara had obviously already found the leads Lumiya’s people had planted. All he had to do was keep straight the details she had sent him. “It’s true I haven’t had time to write a report. My Guard commission came in too soon after our return to Coruscant. Was there something wrong with Ben’s report?”

  “Well, it’s incomplete,” Mara said. “It doesn’t cover what happened while he was unconscious, or what happened to you while you were separated from him.”

  “Oh. Of course.” Jacen frowned as if trying to dig up memories buried beneath tons of more recent events. “Well, let’s just concentrate on those two periods, then. Brisha Syo, Nelani, Ben, and I boarded a sort of railcar that took us into the asteroid’s interior. A pulse of Force energy yanked Ben and Nelani out of the car. After a moment Brisha was yanked free. The car stopped in a deep cavern, and there I was attacked by a Force-user who radiated dark side orientation and wore your face, Luke.”

  Luke nodded. “At the same time, I was fighting a Force projection with your appearance. An altered appearance. And Mara and Ben were fighting distorted versions of each other.”

  “That’s right.” Jacen’s mind clicke
d its way through the details Lumiya had so recently provided as he tried to figure out the best order in which to present the information. “My duel ended when the false Luke hurled some boulders at me and I inverted into a spin with my lightsaber. We both connected. I took a rock to the head and was out for a while. But when I woke up, my opponent was in two pieces, and once I found his head, several meters away, I could see his true features. A Devaronian. He had no identicard on him. His lightsaber was gone.”

  “Gone?” Mara frowned. “So someone came while you were unconscious and took it.”

  Jacen shrugged as if the detail was of no importance. “Probably it just went flying into a cranny somewhere and I couldn’t find it. It was a very low-gravity environment. You could throw a lightsaber hilt a kilometer if you tried.”

  “And Ben?” Luke asked.

  “I found him in an upper cavern,” Jacen said. “Unconscious. Brisha Syo was nearby. She’d lost an arm and had sustained a head injury and sucking chest wound, all of them lightsaber-inflicted. I stabilized her. She seemed pretty sure her habitat’s medical droids would be able to fix her up. She said she found a wicked-looking redhead—her description matched Ben’s ‘evil Mara’—preparing to behead Ben, and that she interfered. She was badly wounded but drove the false Mara into retreat.”

  Luke and Mara exchanged a glance. “So,” Luke said, “if she was telling the truth, the timing can only work out one way. The Dark Jedi, or whatever he was, impersonated Mara and attacked Ben. He won that fight, Brisha stopped him from killing Ben, and he ran off. Then he took my face and attacked Jacen, and Jacen killed him.”

  Mara shook her head. “That doesn’t work, though, if we assume there was some link between the two Jacen-Luke fights and the two Ben-Mara fights. Because my fight with the false Ben and your fight with the false Jacen were simultaneous.”

  “Suggesting that my fight with the false Luke and Ben’s with the false Mara were, too.” Jacen pretended to puzzle that one over. “The only logical conclusion is that there were two enemies in those caverns, not just one.”

  “That’s right.” Luke returned his attention to Jacen. He hesitated a moment before continuing. “Jacen, we have evidence that Brisha Syo was Lumiya’s daughter.”

  Jacen sat back and allowed a look of startlement to cross his features. “I don’t believe it. I’m not that easy to deceive.”

  “She’d be very good at deception,” Mara said. “If she were trained by her mother.”

  “So …” Jacen pretended to think it through. “So Brisha probably killed Nelani. And Brisha dueled Ben.”

  “And Ben cut her to ribbons.” A little pride crept into Mara’s voice with that remark. “But she defeated him with some ploy. And she probably did something to him, altering his memories, maybe making him vulnerable to other techniques, just before you came across them.”

  And now, Jacen told himself, the test of courage. Do you propose to me that my memories were meddled with, too? That my thinking has been altered?

  Luke did seem to be on the verge of saying something else when he looked up and around. A moment later Jacen and Mara felt it, too—a massive surge of surprise, consternation. Other emotions, from another direction, joined the mix: fear, exultation, anger.

  Those emotions had to be projected by hundreds, even thousands of people simultaneously to manifest like this through the Force.

  Jacen grabbed his comlink and spoke into it. “Colonel Solo to the Anakin Solo. Status check.”

  “Sir.” Jacen recognized the voice; it belonged to one of the Anakin Solo’s communications officers. “It’s, ah …” There was silence for a few moments. “Fleet action, sir. There’s a fleet, incoming, they’re everywhere, they’re already hitting the task force around Corellia proper—”

  Jacen stood and ran toward the door leading from the Maw Casino. He grazed the returning Bothan server, spinning her, sending three full drinks to the carpet.

  chapter fourteen

  Across the darkened casino chamber, in a shadow caused by the room arrangement but deepened by her own abilities, Alema Rar hesitated as Jacen Solo bolted for the exit.

  She had noticed Jacen enter and had followed his movements with mild disinterest. After hours of prowling secure hangar bays with no sign of the Millennium Falcon to show for it, she had sought out Captain Lavint in order to help the woman’s gambling success. She had seen Jacen talk to Lavint, then move toward the door to approach two people silhouetted there.

  A minute later a little twitch in the Force convinced her to move closer and get a good look at Jacen’s conversation partners—which was when she had recognized Luke and Mara.

  That recognition sent such a jolt of adrenaline through her that she had to spend several moments calming herself. She brought out her blowgun as she savored the opportunity fate had presented her.

  Luke Skywalker was here. And if he was here, the odds improved that Han and Leia Solo were here, too, or would be soon. It was possible that Alema could finish her mission—could strike down Han and Mara before the disbelieving eyes of their loved ones, causing Luke and Leia the anguish that would return Balance to the universe, to her soul.

  She tucked her blowgun under her bad arm and fumbled for her darts. Just a few more seconds and she would spit poison toward Mara.

  But the disturbance she’d sensed had obviously upset Jacen, and it had to have made Luke and Mara alert; Mara was pulling out a comlink, but Luke was vigilant, looking after Jacen and then around the casino. An assassination attempt now was likely to be detected. But when would she have a better chance?

  She got her dart in hand, placed it into the mouthpiece of her blowgun, and was just raising the weapon to her lips when Luke stood and looked straight at her.

  She froze. He couldn’t possibly see her, not in these conditions. But if she attacked now, when his senses were obviously at their keenest, he couldn’t possibly fail to detect the attack.

  Comlinks all over the casino began to beep and chime. Military personnel stood up from their tables, from their drinks, many of them now in the direct line of fire between Alema and Mara. She hissed, vexed.

  She needed to be closer. She moved forward, still cloaked by the chamber’s natural shadows.

  Then Mara rose, saying something, and she and Luke ran toward the exit. Uniformed personnel also began crowding that way, most of them listening to or speaking into their comlinks.

  Alema picked up the pace, but she was slowed by the crowd, by the fact that one of her feet, little more than a stump, caused her to limp. She shoved gamblers out of her way, using the Force to add a little strength to her efforts.

  But still, it was long, frustrating seconds before she got through the exit, in the middle of a pack of military men and women. Not a tall person, she hopped up and down, looking along the access corridor in both directions for her target.

  There she was, Luke beside her, at a full run in the direction of the bow, almost at the limits of the blowgun’s range. Alema put the weapon to her lips, paused half a second to calm herself, elevated the weapon’s tip to give her dart a trajectory that would carry it near the corridor ceiling, and blew.

  The dart was lost to her sight the moment it left the blowgun. She hopped up twice more to maintain a line of sight on Mara’s retreating back. The dart should hit just about—

  Luke and Mara passed the entrance to a cross-corridor and turned left into it. An Ortolan—blue-furred, big-boned, and squat, with drooping oversized ears and a nasal trunk that reached to midchest—came trotting out of that corridor, turning toward the Maw Casino. Then the Ortolan stumbled and fell face-first onto the corridor floor.

  Alema snarled. Her dart had found the wrong target.

  The moving crowd had grown so thick that without exerting herself fully, and very obviously, through the Force, she could make little headway through the mass of military personnel heading toward the Errant Venture’s vehicle bays. By the time she got to the cross-corridor, there was no sign of
the Jedi.

  A human male emerging from the side corridor bumped into her. He was dark-skinned, good-looking, with thick white hair and a trim white beard and mustache; he carried a silver-tipped cane, and his flaring silken cloak slid across the bodies of everyone he passed, Alema included.

  Alema was twenty meters down the side corridor before she realized who he was.

  Lando Calrissian.

  She all but screamed where she stood. If Lando was here, there could be no question about Han and Leia. She turned back and forth, trying to decide whether to follow Lando or the Skywalkers, and finally turned back to pursue Lando.

  BRIDGE OF THE DODONNA

  “Recall all scouts,” shouted Admiral Tarla Limpan. The gray-green skin and red eyes of her Duros ancestry made her a striking figure on the Star Destroyer’s bridge—a benefit to her now, in the thick of battle. “Launch squadrons as they come ready. Threat assessment! What are we looking at?”

  Finally, a hologrammic schematic of space directly around the planet Corellia sprang into existence above the bridge walkway. Admiral Limpan was actually within the hologram; she took two steps backward to be clear of it. On the schematic, the sphere of Corellia was a blue wire grid; Alliance ships were small green symbols, Corellian craft on the planet’s surface or within her atmosphere were yellow, and unknowns were red. There were lots of unknowns, some of them already streaking down into the atmosphere on the far side of the planet from the Dodonna. Far too many were approaching Dodonna along orbital vectors.

  Though Colonel Moyan, her starfighter coordinator, was not on the bridge—he remained in the starfighter control salon, a nearby compartment—his growling voice echoed over the bridge’s speaker system: “We have two cruisers, a frigate, and a minimum of twelve starfighter squadrons headed our way. That’s only the newcomers. There are at least as many starfighter units rising up from Corellia’s surface. This is an all-out push. Our deployments around Centerpoint Station and the other four worlds are reporting similar mismatches.”